HOMM3 HD

[Don]

Available for Steam for $15. For some reason the reviews are overwhelmingly negative. I can understand if people had problem with the multiplayer (it never really worked well in terms of basic stability wayyyyyy back) but the complains about lack of combo artifacts or Conflux is kind of mindboggling. Conflux is generally pretty weak unless you're trying to do an Armageddon combo, and about the only useful artifact beyond the basic game was the Armageddon's Blade. I think it's missing some of the UI refinement from Armageddon's Blade and you can't do things like hire the lower level version of the creature if you already built the upgrade which affects certain things like Pit Lords (exactly the same upgraded or not if you're not raising more demons but Pit Lords cost way more). I think it's worth checking it out if you played it before and enjoyed it, or if you never did, the campaign is quite good.

On an unrelated note, am I the only one that finds the story leading up to HOMM4 to be kind of crazy? I mean at the end of Armageddon's Blade it's like you just gave the Armageddon's Blade to Gelu the elf, who never struck me as a paragon of all that is good which is probably a guy you want to be wielding the Armageddon's Blade, and then in HOMM4 they talked about how some dude with the Sword of the Frost fought Gelu who wielded the Armageddon's Blade which destroyed the world. Well, I think the first guy's kind of outmatched there. I mean, Sword of Frost versus Armageddon's Blade... yeah... and the funny thing is they probably fought to a draw!

[Don]

Took about 2 weeks before they released the patch that stopped making the game flagged as a virus which made it completely unplayable, but otherwise it's still as good as I remembered. It's also a lot longer and harder and I remembered, though it probably always took that long. This is a good example of how to do the gameplay Valkyria Chronicles is attempting to do but done correctly. Since you build XP by killing stuff but your score is based on how fast you beat the game, the worse your ranking is the easier the game is and vice versa, not counting obviously exploits with Town Portal/Dimensional Doors. Most of the hardest campaigns would still be pretty trivial if you took an extra month to level up your guys but your ranking will suffer some (but it won't be insultingly bad), and if you want to do better you'll have to go with less troops/weaker heroes. There are also tricks to each map though it's not particularly dependent on that, mostly because if you want to try to do a super early rush because you know something isn't defended or whatever then you could just Dimensional Door cheese your way too. For all practical purposes there isn't anything super interesting you can do because there's always a neutral stack or a garrison that is far beyond what you can possibly beat unless you Dimension Door past it, though I remember in some cases any Ballista special hero (e.g. Sir Christian) can be sufficiently high enough that all you need to do is have your starting ballista take out everything, though you're talking about a level 30-40 hero who is literally a walking god at that point.